I can’t begin to explain the way I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks. I don’t think there are words to explain it. I wrote the most incredibly personal final paper for my English 666 course and turned it in on Tuesday. There’s no doubt I’ll get a horrible grade on it, but it seemed like it marked a turning point in my writing. There was something more raw in it than there usually is in anything I say or do.

Maybe because I was actually telling the truth.

Things have been a roller coaster of insanity. I’m not sure whether I’m going up or down. Everything that should make me smile makes me cry, and everything that should make me cry makes me cry harder. I got to school early this morning and no one was in my Economics classroom, so instead of turning on the lights in this huge hall I just waited until my eyes adjusted and walked down to my usual seat. It’s completely dark except for the exit signs above the back doors, the light from the hallway way back behind the 50 odd rows of seats and this laptop monitor. I wish it would just stay this dark. I wish I could curl up in a ball on the floor, with all of the toe jam and old gum and empty water bottles of thousands of entitled Carolina students, and sleep for a million years. Sleep until it all made sense.

A question for those of you with sane and stable relationships: How does one go about being an emo and moody girl while dating a non-emo or moody boy? Especially when said emo girl doesn’t feel comfortable sharing her emo-ness because of said non-emo boy’s lack of it?

No, I will not get it (I mean who could afford that much for a lamp anyway), but I will sigh over it a lot, instead of studying elasticity and preparing for my Economics study session.

On Monday a panel of people gets to decide whether or not I get to go to this school anymore. I am oddly noncommittal about it. Mostly, I think, because if I sit down and realize what is happening, I will die.

There is a crazy guy threatening to make Virginia Tech look like a day at the park near my hometown. How sick do you have to be to threaten something like that after what’s happened? How sick do you have to be to copycat such a disgusting and horrible crime?

No matter what I do, every day it seems like there’s something new throwing itself at my head. And not missing. I pay my bills on time, and I pay over what I owe and I still end up with overage charges for things I didn’t even do… I get a 100+ dollar phone bill two days after I get a phone to replace the one that died two months before my upgrade was allowed…the phone I put on the credit card that I made sure had enough money on it just to find out that they processed my phone charge immediately and have yet to post the payment that was made before it to ensure there was enough there to cover it.

My dad was helping me with medication and insurance, so I went to the doctor…I got my medication, I had my budget perfectly worked out, and then I… suddenly the money I was counting on wasn’t there and when they go to charge my account for my health insurance the money won’t be there. It won’t be there for my cell phone bill either. And it won’t be there for the overage charge on a credit card I had enough money on to pay for exactly what I paid for.

Every day new bills come in from the hospital. Every day I can’t afford to replace the food in the refrigerator. Every day I look at my dirty clothes and know I can’t afford to do my laundry, and every day I sit down and try to figure this all out, and try to keep an even head, and try to be responsible, and budget and make damned sure I have enough to cover my expenses, or cancel whatever it is I can’t pay for, and still somehow I end up drowning.

And the funny thing about it is…now, if I get sick, I know I can’t afford to go to the doctor, regardless of the fact that I have insurance. So I know I won’t. Now I know I can’t afford to go to the psychiatrist, or the psychologist, so I have to cancel my appointments. Now I know I can’t afford my medication, so I’ll go without it and end up curled in a ball in the closet, slamming my head into a wall hoping the bad things will go away. But they never do, the old bad things, the new bad things…they’re always right there around the corner. And suddenly I have no skin.

It’s one of those times when I just don’t know what to say or do. Prayer doesn’t seem like enough, even though I know it’s the biggest thing there is anyone can do in a situation like this. The death count is at 33 as I write this, and I’m sitting here, one state away, feeling so powerless.

It’s wrong, I think, to say that I think my campus is feeling empathetic. With Taheri-Azar driving through the Pit and Jason dying in New Jersey…especially, I think, with K Dot for the people I know/knew, I think we’ve…felt like we’ve gone through enough hell in the past year, I think we’ve been waiting for things to abate… I know everyone on campus this morning seemed in a daze, and it continues as the death toll mounts. I can’t compare our grief… I guess no one ever can.

I can’t even imagine what those students, those families, the campus community must be going through right now. So many horrible, fucked up things have happened that our students have tried to “quietly” struggle with while they get blasted all over international headlines, and this…this is just…so much…worse. I can’t even imagine. I can imagine, but I can’t even imagine.

It’s evil. It’s just evil, and I have no other word for it. We reel from accidents, we try our best to do what’s right, but this kind of horror is just un-fucking-speakable.

Our hearts and prayers and thoughts and love are with you, Virginia Tech. I can’t say it’ll ever be better, or even near the same again…I can’t say anything right now except I’m so, so sorry.

I don’t quite know what to say – or even if I should say anything at all. I don’t know who all reads this (though you should comment right now and tell me if you do, just so I know – I’ve declared it delurking week, just because, you know, if I get all personal, I want to know who is here) and I’ve lately learned that being too candid with the wrong people can get you thrown into hell.

Monday, I was into the fourth or fifth solid day of an unbelievably bad panic attack. It would not go away, no matter what I did, and all the things I usually do when in a situation like that didn’t work. I was sitting in Davis Library on the first floor, I’d finished reading my portion of Daphnus and Chloe for Classics, and was trying to get caught up for my Friday midterm in Economics…all of a sudden I just felt this wave overtake me and I mentally fell over, got knocked out. It was 20 minutes til class and I packed up my things and instead of walking toward Room 104, I headed across campus and requested a walk in appointment with a psychologist at Student Health. It was evident that my medication wasn’t working correctly, or enough, and I needed to be doing MORE to deal with all of my anxiety syndromes and depression…I felt overwhelmed, completely – and absolutely out of control of my emotions. Everything was broken and I couldn’t fix anything.

And the crisis counselor thought I was a danger to myself, and had me checked into the Crisis Psych ward at the University hospital.

The second I got there, I knew it was not going to help – in fact it made me much, much worse. Flourescent lights, people walking around playing with themselves and being, generally, crazy; the loud television blaring Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Dancing With the Stars… I asked to sign myself out, and they gave me the papers, but said I wouldn’t be getting out for at least three days. Sparklepants was there, and I couldn’t stop sobbing, because the bare, bare room was so terrifying, and they had put me on the highest level of suicide watch – they said that the fact that I was crying was proof that I was “upset” and so they definitely needed to keep me. They let Sparklepants go home and get me a book, because all I had was Thomas Merton and I’d been reading him for the last three days. They let her come back for twenty seconds to say goodbye to me and I collapsed there in my bare room, alone. They never told me she brought me things, I had to go out and ask, and then they remembered to go through them. They never gave me my toothbrush or toothpaste – it was a danger to me, somehow, or my saline solution for my contacts…no electronics (though a doctor did give me written permission to keep my laptop, but I wasn’t allowed to have DVDs, because I might have broken them and slit my wrists), but refused to give me my cord (hanging). I snuck my cell phone out of my purse before they went through it, and was thrilled that they had to dig through my sobby, snotty tissues to make sure I didn’t have anything “bad” with me. They took my spiral bound notebooks, my diary, but left me with my pens. They took my iPod and my incredibly nice headphones that I am super careful with and threw them into a box, all tangled up with the cord from my laptop. When I finally fell asleep, they woke me up to check my vitals, then again to stick a needle in my arm and take blood. They shook me awake to tell me they had to take my blood. There were no clocks, so I don’t know what time it was, but it must have been around 4 in the morning.

At eight in the morning a med student came in to wake me up for a meeting with a team of doctors, who instantly made comments about not understanding why the hell I was in there, and I didn’t belong there. They’d get me out that day, they said. One of them wanted to talk to my mom and Sparklepants that morning. The nurses hated me because visiting hours were 5-8pm, and even though mom and Sparklepants had been at the hospital since 6am, they were allowed to come up at 9, and stay until I was discharged. While I was in the bathroom they bitched about the fact that I hadn’t been to any groups. Groups like planting flowers in little dixie cups and decorating them. Groups like coloring my feelings or balancing my checkbook. I stayed in my room and waited and waited and waited, and the doctor came in and said the paperwork was going through and I’d be out by 3pm. I was so incredibly relieved. And I got out, and filled a scrip for something to help me sleep (that doesn’t work) and an upped dosage of one of my medications… I went to a psychiatrist the next day to deal with my meds and she tweaked them as well (all I had wanted in the first place), which cost me 45$ that I didn’t have.

And now it’s Sunday. My mom left this morning. I have no idea what to do about this semester at school. I have a 2pm appointment with a psychologist tomorrow that’s going to set me back another $35…And nothing is getting better. I know, give it time, give it time, but I can’t stop freaking out. I’m just…

How do I begin to describe how I’ve been feeling lately? Overwhelmed comes close, but doesn’t hit the nail on the head. It’s more like everything is going wrong, wrong, wrong and coming at me at 17,000 miles an hour and I have no idea how to stop it, or how to hold up under it.

I am over a cliff, hanging on to a tiny tree branch by my fingernails, just trying to get a grip on something – anything. I keep thinking maybe it’s like one of those movie scenes where the lead keeps desperately trying to hold on, not knowing that the ground is two inches underneath her feet and if she’d just let go, she’d be completely safe. Like trying to stay afloat in two feet of water, thinking you’re in the middle of the ocean.

But I’ve looked and there is no ledge underneath me, and there ain’t no sand, neither.

It always comes down to this: maybe I’m just not cut out for any of it. Maybe it’s a losing battle. Maybe there’s no point anyway. Or maybe everybody feels that way.

In 1955 in No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton said,

“The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness. If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would begin really to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think and acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul.”(125-6)

Struggling under the weight of all of these real things, and trying to keep up with the “realities” of analyzing Plato and Butler and Homer and all of it. There’s too much theory and too much analysis, when all I want is my pillow and a blanket and maybe a nice couch to fall asleep on.

So, tonight we had our first official Kappa Slappa Ho sponsored FCR (feminist consciousness raising) meeting. My Carmapuchia and I have decided (well, I asked her) to make a post together, because we are sooo cute like that..

The first thing we noticed today was that I talk too much. Well, we noticed that a long time ago, but tonight specifically I said that people should call me on it because I learned to talk over people so that I could get a word in edgewise with my dad in conversation and now I just interrupt everybody and it’s really rude and people hate me for it. No they don’t, says Carmapuchia. They just think I talk too much.

Then there was the part where people took pictures of me with a vibrator in my mouth and nose. At the same time cause it was the same vibrator. Cause it has two parts, one for your clitoris and one for your g-spot. The g-spot part was the one that was in my mouth, the clit part was in my nose. Well, technically my nostril. Hi dad.

Lots of people came. We had cake and pie. And no ice cream, Sparkle Pants just lied and said we did. But cake pie and ice cream is pretty sweet and fun to say together. Nobody is going to get that, because Sally Struthers ate all the cake, pie and ice cream and also the Cheesy Poofs. Do you understand now? No? My Econ professor wrote a text book with Matt Stone’s dad. Now do you get it? No? Then you suck.

We had a good conversation, I think. And then I was interviewed for a newspaper article and the writer was trying to follow me with a pen and paper. He should have had a tape recorder because I talk fast and I almost said “here, let me get my digital recorder and tape this and just give it to you” but he is the reporter so it’s his responsibility and it’s not my fault if he can’t get a tape recorder and just uses a pad like that guy on that episode of Veronica Mars. That is a good show, you guys should watch it.

Amen.

Gay Men. Haha.

Today Lena and I exchanged hymns. It was a very special Christian time for us. We were very special Christians and we talked about hymns. And it was cool. I love Lena. Her girlfriend and I could make out and it would be just as meaningless as making out with my Carmapuchia. I mean, not meaningless, but it would be like kissing my elbow.

Did I mention I had a vibrator in my mouth? And I got cool shoes the other day. Hi mom.

I watched a movie called “Connie and Carla” and it is good. You should watch it. I also watched a movie called “Another Gay Movie” and it is weird, and it is the gay version of American Pie, but with butt plugs. It was weird. You can see it if you want to, but you probably have to go to the gay store to rent it. There is one here, and it is nice, but the guy will make you put lube on your hands and you won’t be able to open a door for three hours or until you get to wash your hands, and the lube will smell like Lavender.

P.S. Eros is the best lube and you don’t have to keep re applying it if you are having sex with someone up the butt, but it is very expensive, but it is the same price as regular lube because you use less of it. Just a tip from your friendly girl who got a score of 97 percent better than other people who took the sex test who are actually having sex, and I am not, but I know more than them, and I say use Eros and a condom so you don’t get a disease, like the syph, because Carmapuchia’s voice is giving me the syph.

That’s a reference to Connie and Carla, go rent it now.

Anyway like I was saying, we had an awesome night and I might be in the newspaper but not because I know a lot about lube, that is Bee’s fault, she tells me way too much about sex toys and gay man sex. The google hits I get from this post should be interesting.

P.S.S. I love you all, please call me and tell me how wonderful I am because I am a little depressed and i have a paper due tomorrow that I have not written because I was having a four hour meeting about butt plugs and lube, no just kidding about feminism and stuff that is good and Carmen is feeling herself up. And with that I will say goodnight.

So.

Goodnight.

Currently Reading

Eve Ensler, Insecure At Last

Brettell and Sargent, eds. Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Quoth the Raven:

"Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know, that they have lost something and picked up something else."